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So I was first inspired to do this when I got back from South America.
I had always had a monthly re design of my room before I left, as I find it gets really boring way too fast. Modern day furniture has no life in it. Most of the time it’s really cheaply made, pretty basic and very easily re-designable which was great in my case.

My primary inspiration was a set of three tribal turtle tattoo designs which I found on google images.
I have always loved tribal designs as they look really cool and so I decided to draw and paint them onto the first three drawers. This worked out amazingly and it looked pretty snazzy, but, then my eyes wondered to the handles on the drawers. My thought process was like “I need to do something to the handles too, or my work isn’t complete!”. Yes, you could say I am kind of a perfectionist in that aspect.

My home has always had around three to four dremel’s that are lying around the place. For some reason they get bought (because of their amazing price!) and then, they pile up in a cupboard somewhere. So when I came up with using the primary design on the turtles for the draw handles, I decided to go for a more 3D look by using a dremel.

Now if you have never used a dremel before practice is in order, or you will cry at the results you get at trying to “artistically design your furniture”. After you have had practice, using a dremel is really easy. Draw the design you want to use onto the handle as a base and then go over the design using various dremel tools. Now do not rush your work. It took me about half an hour per handle to get the nice carved look I wanted. Also, this is totally up to personal preference, but after I carved the designs into the handles I painted one of them black and left the other one normal. I was going for a kind of chess board design on them as I like the fact that now they all looked different.After the first three drawers were completed I looked at the bottom three and thought “Okay! Most turtles don’t swim very deep down in the water, so, what does?” I do not know why but right at that moment the jellyfish song started playing in my head: “Jellyfish! Jellyfish! etc.”
In conclusion, the animals I chose to paint on the draws were jellyfish! A set of three, in the same design as the turtles were. Small, medium and large.
I didn’t want to copy someone elses design this time, as every body has their own unique way of drawing stuff, so I looked on google images for pictures of real life jellyfish and went on from there.
After I had designed, drawn and painted them onto the three bottom drawers, I came up with three more handle designs, per draw, that matched each jellyfish.
When the base of the furniture was completed, I just had to attack the top. It looked so lonely!
The main design had been based on sea creatures, so now I decided to paint on the bottom corners of the top, my two favourite land and air animals. These being a wolf and a humming bird. I made these animals into tribal ones using their real life versions.
Now that the two bottom corners were done in the complete design I had sea, land and air so, I thought a sun was in order and to tie that all up my two favourite star signs.
After designing and painting a sun, scorpio and capricorn star signs onto the top of my chest of drawers it was finally finished.
All that was needed was a varnish over all of the designs so that they wouldn’t get scratched off. This brought the whole piece of furniture together really nicely and made it look amazing!

Now you don’t need to base your furniture on tribal, it can be with any design you want, but it is a great way of making your room look beautiful but really personal at the same time

I thought I’d give you an intro on how and why I started being inspired to really get into art.
In January of this year, I left England to go to Colombia, South America. This was primarily to teach little kids English but after a few months I was told I wasn’t going to be used as a teacher, as the six months I was staying there were not sufficient to really teach them. Of course this was a big set back for me.
I started being used as a jack of all trades from cleaning to spending my days picking coffee. This made me think how I could use the things I had learnt to help and inspire the kids.
I found some squares that I could paint on that were being used to cover up some holes in the classrooms, so I offered to have a go drawing Disney cartoons on them.
I had always had a knack for getting any picture and being able to blow it up in my head so I could draw it at any size I wanted. So I did this on two of the four squares. I was then given a box of kids acrylic paints and some really basic paintbrushes. If you ever want to be challeneged I advise you to try that out. It can be very interesting. So anyway, I learnt from trial and error how to put a painting together which takes a lot of patience but it also proved to me that you don’t need training to make something amazing (it helps) but it’s not neccessary.